"We have the transactions," Reed said. "The motive is getting clearer, but I want to know how Mercer authorized the diversion."
"And whether Andrew knew what the money represented," Simone added.
"Exactly."
Nia opened a video collected under warrant from a commercial property near the county line. The image showed Keller's patrol car arriving behind a gray truck. A second vehicle pulled in several minutes later. Its driver stepped out beneath an exterior lamp, but his face stayed turned away from the camera. He wore a sheriff's department jacket and moved with the broad, familiar posture Simone had seen that morning.
"We can't positively identify him from that clip," Nia said before Simone could speak.
"No," Simone agreed. "Can we match the arrival to access records?"
"Working on it."
A second recording showed the same unidentified man entering an office near the loading yard. When he emerged, he carried a flat envelope. The envelope went into a pickup truck registered to Andrew's company. Again the driver's face was obscured. Again the missing frame was maddeningly close.
Simone watched twice, then closed the window. "We have enough to keep looking. We don't have enough to say it's Mercer."
At 8:43 p.m., the command room phone rang. Rios answered, listened, and handed it to Reed. He frowned as the caller spoke, then asked for a written report and ended the call.
"There's been an incident at the sheriff's department," he said. "An overnight systems technician reports that someone tried to delete archived dispatch entries from the warehouse dates. The technician stopped the process and preserved the system logs. The access credentials belong to a senior administrator."
"Mercer?" Simone asked.
"We don't know who was at the keyboard. Credentials aren't a face."
Simone looked toward the whiteboard, where the sheriff's name had until now sat beneath a heading labeled POSSIBLE KNOWLEDGE. The inquiry had started with missing rescue equipment and moved through false invoices, frightened workers, a traffic stop, and a broken liftgate. Now someone was apparently trying to destroy records that might connect them all.
"Get the technician someplace safe to speak," she said. "And let's find out who thought the files were worth erasing."
Outside, the last orange color drained from the sky over Westbridge. At a rescue station less than five miles from the warehouse, firefighters were checking a borrowed generator ahead of the next week's weather drill. They had no idea that the equipment listed in their readiness plan might be sitting inside a private storage yard, waiting to be sold a second time.
Simone finished her sandwich, opened a fresh page in her notebook, and wrote one sentence at the top: Follow the people who need the records to disappear.
The systems technician was named Caleb Hart, a thin, quiet man of thirty-one who had worked for Westbridge County long enough to know how much trouble could follow an unexplained change to an official record. He arrived at the state police training building after midnight carrying a folder of printed system alerts and an expression that suggested he had spent the drive imagining what he would say if anyone tried to stop him. He had called Rios directly because he did not trust the sheriff's office to receive a complaint about itself.